What Do Bacon and Your Shampoo Have in Common?
by Tera Warner
Did you realize that when you use common drug store shampoo to wash your hair, your liver is forced to process the same amount of nitrates you would consume eating an entire pound of bacon!
And that’s just from ONE shampooing!!
How Did We Get Duped Into Putting This Stuff On Us?
Research from a natural deodorant company discovered that the average woman is lathering her body in up to 515 different synthetic chemicals every day!!*
Aside from perfume (which is responsible for about half the number of chemicals), an alarming amount of them are going directly on your face in the form of:
- face wash
- shower gel
- soap
- toner
- moisturizer
- foundation
- concealer
- powders
- bronzer
- blush
- eyebrow pencils and powders
- lipsticks and liners
- eye liner
- mascara
- facial cleanser
- exfoliating products
- make-up remover
- pimple potions
- sunscreen
This toxic combination of chemicals is compromising our skin and our body health! With weakened, damaged skin, we run back to the pharmacy for more acne creams, pimple potions and other lotions to hide our blemishes and banish wrinkles without ever realizing this alarming fact:
[tweet_dis]Very often the products we put on our skin are the CAUSE
of our skin problems, not the solution![/tweet_dis]
Looking at the Label, Isn’t Enough
For much of my adult life, I assumed that if a product made its way to shelf in a store, it must have been thoroughly pre-screened, inspected and safety approved for my enjoyment and consumption.
I didn’t really question it. The more I learned, the more I realized there’s some pretty fishy business going on in the world of “beauty” and even “natural beauty” products–their ingredients, labels and marketing practices.
Recently, I spent hundreds of hours researching the ingredients in products of about 16 of the most common and well-known “natural” beauty companies. In order to do this research I also had to spend time investigating label regulations in the Cosmetic Labeling Guide, organic certification standards and an endless barrage of overwhelmingly complicated and confusing information.
Now if all these pages and volumes of perfectly punctuated legal jargon resulted in an environment where we could trust the safety of our personal care products, I might not mind it so much. But in actual fact, many cosmetic companies continue to create harmful products with untested ingredients in spite of all this legal jargon.
[tweet_dis]If you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, you definitely shouldn’t judge a beauty product by its label![/tweet_dis]
Where There Is Confusion, You Are More Likely to Give Up Control
These complicated regulations create what can feel like an impenetrable barrier between you and your right and ability to understand what’s going on in the cosmetic industry.
Those thick books might convince you that the whole thing is under some sophisticated control, but most everyday personal care products you find in the drug store or department stores are LOADED with untested, hormone-disrupting, truly harmful ingredients negatively affecting your health.
If you hoped the health food store would have better solutions, the fact is most often that’s simply not true. (Once you’ve watched this video, you’ll feel WAY more informed and empowered about your ability to decipher what you’re putting on your skin, and so IN your body.)
In so many areas of life–law, medicine, finance–entire complicated vocabularies are created just to keep people from understanding. Think about this:
If you actually were willing to take the time to understand the tax code of your country, just imagine how many people’s jobs would be threatened and how much less you would be paying in taxes!!
If you understood well and completely how your body worked, the principles of nutrition and medicine, how many people and pharmaceutical companies would not be making money off your ill health?
[tweet_dis]Companies that profit off other people’s ignorance and overwhelm don’t deserve your hard-earned money.[/tweet_dis]
You owe it to yourself to invest a little time and attention in sorting out the confusions in your life so you can have good control and feel confident, informed and empowered by the choices you make.
Life’s hectic pace keeps us running in the race to keep up with the Jones’s and it’s easy in our overwhelm to take short cuts and ignore some of the little things that can have a big impact on our overall well-being.
These three tips to pre-screen your personal care products should take a little more confusion out of the equation and put a little more control in your hands when it comes to your health and well-being.
3 Tips to Pre-Screen Your Personal Care Products
Go ahead and pick up a bottle of your personal care products–just whatever you have lying around in the bathroom, or tucked in your purse. Just grab it and look at it.
#1 Is clarity a priority?
Is this company making it easy for me to see what’s in their product? Are the ingredients written in a way that it feels the company is trying to help you understand what’s in the product, and where it came from?
What effort is the company making to be transparent about the ingredients they use? The more, the better.
REMEMBER: Label regulations do not require all ingredients to be listed. You can have hundreds of synthetic, untested chemicals in your product JUST under the name “fragrance.” In this video you’ll see exactly what I mean.
Here’s a little example of why you need to watch for more than just an ingredient list–what you’re looking for is that company’s intention and effort to pierce or eliminate confusion so you understand exactly what you’re getting and trust the quality of the product.
For example…
Most “natural” products contain fillers and are largely composed of tap water, “aloe vera juice extract” and other ingredients that are trying to appear natural, but are usually refined and with questionable quality at best. When you read “water” or “aqua” in an ingredient list, you might imagine that it’s came from a clear, running stream in a mountain valley, but if they haven’t said that explicitly, you can be sure it hasn’t.
If it doesn’t tell you what kind of water it is, then that’s a pretty good sign they’re not taking responsibility for what kind of water it is and they’d rather not have you know. (In general, beauty care products that are loaded with water as the main ingredient, don’t tend to be very high quality or high value anyway!)
Remember: What’s written on the label is no guarantee that all ingredients have been accounted for. Trusting the cover of a package just because it has pictures of leaves on it, or because it says that it is “natural” or “organic” doesn’t mean that it is.
#2. If you don’t understand something, clear it up.
Big, long, confusing ingredient lists, often written in very small print, are intentionally designed to be confusing, difficult to read and even more difficult to understand. That’s because if you really understood what was in your personal care products, you wouldn’t be using them! 😉
So assume that if the company you’re investigating hasn’t made it really clear what’s in their products or worked to be transparent about the level of clean and green they’re working to provide, be skeptical and find out for yourself what’s in the product.
One of the best resources available is the Skin Deep Database, where you can enter the specific ingredients in your products and immediately access the available research, documentation indicating the degree of safety, possible risks and threats, etc. associated with each ingredient. That’s how I did the bulk of my research for this video.
If you feel confused about your products, or the information you’re being given, it may be intentional. Don’t get lazy about looking after yourself. Who else is going to do it? While it make feel like a pain in the butt to look up ingredients, once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll really start to pierce the layers of marketing and trust your ability to sniff out a fake!
Which brings us to our most important pre-screening tip:
#3 Trust yourself.
If, after you’ve looked it over, you feel comfortable with the product and feel good about the ingredients, then just trust yourself and your ability to perceive. Your body is equipped inherently with a keen system of screening tools. Your olfactory system is incredibly powerful and able to respond to the subtlest of cues.
Unfortunately, being bombarded by synthetic chemicals and toxic fragrances can de-sensitize us a little, but the more you practice and improve your personal quality control, the better you’ll get.
The most important thing is that your right to be informed honestly has been respected. From there you get to choose what you want and what most supports you and your needs, wants and intentions. There are times when a little lipstick that isn’t quite perfectly natural, or the occasional water-proof mascara that might not be pure as mud still feels like just the right thing for a hot night on the town.
It’s not that you have to be perfectly pure all the time. But you should be honestly informed of the risks and hazards of the choices you make and from there you can call the shots.
Life isn’t necessarily better when you live in a toxin-free bubble. But there’s no benefit to feeling swindled or tricked into buying something you believe is good for you, which really is causing you harm. Don’t just trust the pretty pictures or flashy advertising. There are times when you want to prioritize your self-care–where choosing what’s truly good for you feels good, too.
That’s when you choose a company you trust, whose communication is transparent, and with people whose values you respect and feel good about.
Cuz maybe in life you’ll want to eat bacon once in a while, just for the pleasure of it. You have that right, but let’s keep it out of our shampoo. 😉
